Just Between Us Read online

  “Anything white,” I answered, before I saw that what she held was not a bottle of wine but of sparkling, flavored water.

  “I’ve got plain, too, if you’d prefer it?”

  “No, no this is fine,” I said, although I’ve got to admit that I was a bit disappointed. It would have been much easier to have this conversation if both of us had a pleasant buzz.

  She poured two glasses and sat down across from me at the kitchen island. “Thanks again for making Daniel’s costume—you’re so clever. I’m not crafty like that—Daniel should have you for a mother.”

  “No, no, you’re a wonderful mom—he gets so much from you.”

  We went on like this for two minutes. It’s the standard female friends drill—no, you’re wonderful; no, you!—that can drive people outside the circle a bit crazy.

  When she mentioned that Viktor was working late, I took the opening. “Those long hours must be super stressful,” I said.

  “Mmm,” she said, which was decidedly noncommittal.

  “I get annoyed when Eric’s job cuts into our home life. For instance, when he has to spend the weekend grading. We argue about it sometimes.”

  “That’s too bad,” she said, but then one of the cleaners came into the kitchen and that was the end of the conversation. At Heather’s suggestion, we carried our glasses out of the kitchen and into her formal living room. I thought how nice it must be to have someone to do the dirty work for you, to not have to spend countless hours fighting a losing battle against the perpetual untidiness of a house with children.

  “Do you trust them?” I whispered to Heather, both of us turning at the noise as one of the women pushed a vacuum down the hall and into the dining room. Even though I knew she couldn’t hear me, I still whispered, uncomfortable with the classism clearly on display. There were the two of us sitting with our drinks, doing nothing, the very definition of the idle rich, while behind us a small bevy of worker bees combed through the house putting things in order.

  “No,” Heather said. “I think they like to listen in on my conversations.”

  “Really?” I laughed. “I meant do you trust them with your things? I didn’t even think of eavesdropping.”

  It occurred to me at that moment that there were always people in this house—the cleaners, the nanny, the lawn crew—and if what Alison suspected was true, then wouldn’t these people have seen something? Wouldn’t they have reported it, even if anonymously? This wasn’t our parents’ generation, after all, with its polite silences and stiff upper lips, when people didn’t talk about what went on behind closed doors. We lived in an era of public spectacle, reality TV and confessions. See something, say something—wouldn’t that apply to marital terrorism as well?

  That should have been the end of it. I’d concluded that there was nothing whatsoever going on with Viktor and Heather, and I texted Julie this, giving her the green light to forget about what she’d seen and to tell Alison to forget it, too. I’d been in Heather’s house, I’d seen how many people were around; if something was going on we’d know about it. “Alison needs to stop letting her imagination run away with her,” I told Julie. I was utterly confident when I said that; I never apologized to Alison, but I should have.

  It was over a month after Julie had seen Heather and Viktor at the Chens’ party, and almost three weeks since I’d stopped by her house, when something happened that changed my mind. A weekday morning, a Tuesday I think, the kids off school for some teacher in-service day.

  “I don’t know why the schools have so many of these,” Julie complained as she watched her kids racing around the playground. “We never got this many days off.”

  “Yes, and we walked uphill to school both ways,” I said with mock solemnity.

  “In the snow,” Alison added with a laugh.

  “I’m serious,” Julie said, but belied that by laughing, too.

  We’d met at the War Memorial Park, which despite its somber name had a bright and cheerful playground. I was almost giddy with pleasure at the chance for some adult company and conversation. The three of us sat at a picnic table near the swings, relaxing under the sun, unusually warm for fall, while keeping an eye on the kids. Julie glanced at her watch, asking, “Where’s Heather?” We’d arranged to meet at ten A.M., which really meant tenish, but it was almost eleven and there was still no sign of her. Usually, if one of us got delayed we’d text the others, but no one had heard from Heather.

  A few minutes later, Daniel dashed past us to join the other kids, and we turned to see Heather crossing the lawn from the parking lot, carrying one of those cardboard take-out trays with coffee cups. “Stopped at Starbucks for us,” she said, passing out cups.

  “You’re a godsend!” Julie exclaimed as she took hers, immediately removing the lid to blow on it.

  “Starbucks?” Alison said. “How come?”

  As in how come she hadn’t stopped at Crazy Mocha, our coffee shop, which was also closest to the park? “Went to one with a drive-thru,” Heather said, taking a seat at the table. She leaned back, turning her face up to the sun and closing her eyes. From the playground, Daniel’s voice cried, “Mommy, come swing me!”

  “In a minute,” Heather called without looking. She lifted her head enough to take a sip of coffee. “It’s so beautiful out.”

  “We’d almost given up on you two,” I said. “Busy morning?”

  “Oh, I just forgot the time,” Heather said in her usual languid way. This was the way she always was, relaxed and seemingly without a care—that’s what I want to emphasize, that she never seemed under any particular stress and that’s why I never guessed that anything was wrong.

  Before Heather could reply, Daniel interrupted, crying, “Mommy! Mommy! Come swing me! Come now, Mommy!”

  “Okay, hold on,” Heather said, sighing as she sat up and gave us all an apologetic smile before heading over to help her son. I heard the crunch of another car and looked toward the parking lot. When I turned back to the playground, Heather was going hand-over-hand across the monkey bars while Daniel laughed and clapped with glee at his mother’s antics.

  “What the hell?” I swore under my breath, but Alison heard it all the same. I’m sure she was surprised; I try not to use profanity, especially around the kids. I felt her look at me, but I was staring at Heather. Hanging from the bars made her coat and shirt ride up, exposing her midriff.

  My envy of her firm, finely toned abdomen had been followed by shock as she turned and I saw a long swath of fiery red, raised skin—a large welt that was fresh from the looks of it. Julie must have seen it at the same time, because she blurted out, “What on earth happened to you?”

  Heather seemed startled, but then she let go of the bars and dropped to the ground, immediately tugging down her coat. I swallowed hard against the sudden bile in my throat as Heather came back at a rapid clip across the grass to pick up her coffee as if there were nothing wrong.

  “That’s a painful-looking welt,” I managed to say to Heather. “How did you do that?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, waving a hand as if it were nothing of consequence. “I bumped into a door.”

  “Bumped?” Julie said. “I’d call that more like a slam.”

  Alison’s lips were compressed in a thin line and she shot “I told you so” eyes at Julie and me. Questions raced through my head: Was that mark really from a door? And if so, had someone thrown her against it? Had Viktor? I couldn’t ask the questions; they stuck in my mouth, thick and unpleasant. I suddenly understood how Julie felt at the Chens’ party.

  I felt the same nasty shock seeing that mark on Heather’s alabaster skin, my stomach turning over with the queasiness of having seen something I shouldn’t, of having trespassed, unwittingly, into someone else’s private life.

  chapter four

  HEATHER

  I haven’t told my friends, but I think they might suspect. It’s hard to make too many excuses without my absence raising questions.

  We haven�
�t seen you in so long! Julie wailed in a text when I begged off, for the second week running, from our Friday morning coffee. A flurry of texts from Alison and Sarah followed, all expressing concern. It’s very sweet, although frustrating, too, adding stress on top of the stress that I’m already feeling. They would ask questions if they saw me—they would notice what I don’t want them to notice—and I just can’t handle that on top of everything else. I think I might explode.

  But I can’t. I have to get through each day and put on that happy face before Viktor gets home in the evening. He likes me to be happy; he says if I would only smile more it would relieve the stress from his day. I know that he thinks he’s given me everything and I should be grateful. I am grateful. Or I try to be. I read books like 365 Days of Happiness and Gratitude Your Attitude, the kind found in the self-help sections of bookstores and libraries. All advise me to perform tasks like list the things I’m thankful for in my life.

  Today I’m grateful that Viktor will be home late. He will not see the casserole that I’ve burned because I was out back smoking and lost track of time. No one knows I smoke, not even my friends. Everyone’s so anti-smoking and judgey these days. You can’t light up anywhere without some stranger getting in your face to ask you to please, please blow the lung cancer elsewhere. I can just see Sarah’s judgmental glare if she knew. Actually, smoking is one of the few things that I have in common with Viktor’s mother. She and all of her European friends smoke, although she doesn’t make any attempt to hide it from her son, like I do. Whenever we visit her, Viktor complains, grabbing her cigarettes and throwing them out. Dramatic gestures that she likes because they make her feel loved. I wish I could be like her and just smoke in the open.

  It would probably be comical to watch me sneak out of the kitchen door and along the flagstone patio to the corner of the house, where I stand on tiptoe to reach a little crevice between the stone and the graying white fascia for the pack and lighter I’ve hidden there. I favor Marlboros, which is ironic given their hypermasculine ad campaigns, but my lighter is girly, a purple Bic from a Sheetz gas station. One a day, that is all I allow myself now. It’s not like the days when I modeled and we all lived on cigarettes and booze in between cadging free dinners paid for by older, reptilian men. Yes, I gave up all that glamour for the provincial life of the suburbs.

  “Mommy, something smells funny!” It’s Daniel at the back door, and I stub out the cigarette as fast as a wink and squirrel my pack away. At first I think he’s referring to the cigarette smoke, but then I smell it, too—dinner burning. I race into the kitchen, which is more than twice the size of my mother’s, and open the convection oven to find the top layer of cheese on my casserole dark brown and smoking.

  Sometimes I feel as if I’m playing the role of traditional housewife—I’m cooking casseroles, for heaven’s sake. If I just added crushed potato chips to this dish I could be my own mother back in the late seventies, bustling about her avocado kitchen with her shag haircut and polyester dress, consulting Redbook for recipes to appease the insatiable appetite of my mutton-chopped and leisure-suited father. Certainly Viktor reminds me of him sometimes, coming home every night with the same sense of expectation and entitlement.

  “What’s for dinner?” he asks, no matter what hour he comes home. Once I actually said, “I don’t know, I’ll ask the elves.” I had a brief moment to enjoy the confused look on his face before he got upset.

  “He has a very stressful job.” These are the excuses and justifications I hear from his mother and mine. “Viktor will always work long hours and his schedule will always be changing; being a doctor’s wife means having to understand that.”

  That’s what I am, you see. I’m no longer a person in my own right, I’m a doctor’s wife. A surgeon’s wife, to be precise. I serve on a hospital’s charitable board, along with a host of other people, many of whom seem to spend a lot of time struggling desperately to avoid getting older. Everyone is on a diet all the time and they discuss the latest antiaging creams and regimens with a seriousness that might suggest they were cures for cancer.

  All the other wives on the board are torn between envy of the plastic surgeons’ spouses and gratitude that they’re not one of us. On the one hand, they imagine that we can get the “work” everyone has had done or wants to have done at a big discount. On the other hand, they wonder if we ever make love without imagining our husbands mentally re-sculpting us. As one Texas transplant put it, “D’yall scream any time your husbands pick up a Sharpie?”

  “Not that you have to worry,” one of the older women says to me. “Not with your height and skin.” She gives my upper arm a tiny squeeze like I’m a peach at the market. “Did anyone ever tell you that you could be a model?”

  “No, never.”

  Of course I’m aware of my looks. What can I say? I won the gene lottery. But people assume that looking good comes with other luck, and that’s not true at all. I’ve never been lucky in love, for instance, though I’ve been hopeful each and every time.

  Viktor and I met at a party in Miami. He was attending a conference and I was down from New York doing the winter circuit, and we happened to meet at the hotel bar. He was in a crowd of doctors loudly and animatedly discussing a complete facial transplant—a horror story, when you think about it—but I felt his eyes on me as I excused my way past them to order a drink at the long teak bar. I wore a sky-blue sheath dress that was a gift from a designer whose show I’d walked that spring, and Viktor said that he thought the dress matched my eyes perfectly. Such a sweet, sweet thing to say—I remember being impressed that he noticed the color of my eyes. That was before I knew how detail-oriented he was and how much appearances mattered to him.

  “We need to set up an appointment with an orthodontist,” he said the other morning after Daniel gave him his best five-year-old gap-toothed smile. By “we” Viktor means “you.” He does this all the time; I’m not sure he’s aware of it. “We need to get more groceries,” or “We need to tell the cleaners to do a better job with the vacuuming—there are lines in the carpet.”

  Well, “we” don’t want to talk to the cleaners, who are resentful that one of us is just a more expensively dressed version of them, an American success story, who married her way out of an Appalachian backwater into a better social class. And “we” don’t think that five-year-olds need to worry about their teeth, not yet—not for some time. I’d ignore these demands, but he’s meticulous and will be sure to remember and ask about them. It’s an unspoken agreement: He will work his obscenely long hours and barely see his wife and child, and I will make his life as smooth as possible and tolerate his moods.

  “You should be happy,” my mother says to me when I talk to her. I can picture her in that kitchen that has been “freshened” so it’s no longer avocado, all the appliances swapped for “biscuit” or “almond.” She is always in her kitchen, standing with the cordless phone as if she can’t move anywhere else in the house, a holdover from the days when the cord limited her reach. “What I wouldn’t give for what you have—that security.” My mother is whispering because my father will hear her from the next room. He’s been made redundant again, and this time there will be no other job for him. “You’ve got to take the bad with the good,” my mother says. “That’s what it means—for better and for worse. You promised.”

  Another thing I’m grateful for: sleeping pills. With any luck, by the time Viktor gets home tonight I’ll already be fast asleep.

  chapter five

  ALISON

  I choked on my coffee when Julie called what we’d seen a “potential domestic problem.”

  “Are you referring to Heather being abused by her husband?” I said once I’d stopped coughing.

  “Don’t use that word,” Julie hissed, glancing around the coffee shop to see if anyone else had heard. “I just saw Terry Holloway come in—that woman lives for gossip.”

  “Who?” I asked, turning in my seat.

  “Don’t look,” S
arah warned, and I turned back, catching only a brief glimpse of a skinny woman with a snotty expression who seemed to be arguing with a barista.

  “We don’t know that’s what it is,” Julie said in a low voice. “For all we know Heather was telling the truth and it was an accident.”

  We were sitting in our corner of Crazy Mocha on a rainy Saturday afternoon, a day that we knew Heather had a long-standing spa appointment and wouldn’t see us. We were child-free, our kids in the care of their fathers or, in the case of our oldest three, at a birthday party for one of their classmates.

  “That was no accident,” I said, looking to Sarah for support, but she appeared to be waffling. “C’mon, you both saw that welt. Are you actually going to tell me that you’re not worried about her?”

  “I know, but they’ve always seemed like such a happy couple,” Julie said, a slight whine in her voice. I think part of her was annoyed with me for spoiling the image she had of the gorgeous couple leading a fairy-tale life in their mansion on the hill. Understanding that humans are flawed and often disappointing was something of a birthright for me.

  “They might be happy some of the time, but he still beats her,” I said, trying to be gentle, although I know my tone couldn’t hide my impatience.

  Julie flinched at the word “beats,” and her hands tightened on her coffee cup. Sarah said, “We don’t know that—it could have been an accident like Heather said.” I gave her an incredulous look, and her gaze shifted away from mine.

  “Maybe you’re seeing abuse because you’re expecting to see it,” Julie said, voice dropping to a whisper on “abuse.” “Like you’re creating the reality you want to see.”

  “What does that mean?” I said, no longer bothering to hide my irritation. “That this is all in my head?” How could she and Sarah get what we’d seen at the park out of their heads? I certainly hadn’t managed it.